


the taste of nightshade

by Nekositting



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel of Mercy, Attempted Murder, F/M, Fridge Horror, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Not Beta Read, POV Third Person Limited, Psychological Horror, Rape/Non-con Elements, Severus Snape Being a Bastard, Severus Snape Lives, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:09:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27454774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nekositting/pseuds/Nekositting
Summary: He was supposed to let them find her, poisoned, in her home.But he couldn’t do it, couldn’t let her fade.Even if it might come at the price of his freedom, even if it meant that she might learn the truth of what he had done and would continue to do, he could not.What a fool he was.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Severus Snape
Comments: 10
Kudos: 51
Collections: Page 394 Guy Fawkes Bonfire Exchange 2020





	the taste of nightshade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Draughtofpeace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draughtofpeace/gifts).



> My contribution to the Guy Fawkes Bonfire Fic Exchange! 
> 
> Please mind the tags and my horrid typos! I had no beta reader this time.

Hermione woke with a slow start.

It was like she was lying at the bottom of quick sand, her body compressed and weighed down by the thousands of particles, as she tried to breathe, to break its gelatinous surface with her face.

Hermione sucked in a harsh breath, and her lungs, they stuttered as if they hadn’t breathed in days, weeks.

_In and out._

_In and out._

She swallowed until she was no longer choking on air, no longer sinking. 

_Merlin_ , what had happened to her?

Why couldn't she breathe? It wasn't some Herculean task. She just needed to bloody _breathe_ , to—

“You’re awake.”

She blinked her eyes open, startled, but her throat was too dry for her to properly vocalise that feeling of unrest that overtook. She was breathing, was alive. She was lying down on something soft and not sinking down to the bottom of a dark hole. 

Hermione Granger was awake and alive.

The world came in and out of focus for a moment, and then, clarity.

The gravel-like walls, the dim lighting, and the shadow hovering at the furthest edge of her vision: all of it crystalised.

She was in a room of some sort, a place she didn't recognise. 

“I don’t appreciate the delay, Miss Granger.”

That voice rumbled in the room as if someone had just shouted in a cavernous hole. 

She winced, willing her hands to climb up to cover her ears, but they wouldn't obey or listen.

" _Today_ , Miss Granger."

The voice became more biting and sarcastic. Familiar. She'd heard this voice before, long ago. 

"Miss Granger."

It was the voice of her greatest critic, of her loudest doubts. 

There was no doubt who it belonged to.

It could only belong to _him_.

“P-professor Snape?”

Her voice was brittle. Unrecognisable. It was commendable that she could even get the words out at all. Her throat was raw, as if someone had sanded away at her vocal cords. 

She tried to move again, to force herself to sit up to her elbows and face the direction from where Snape's voice had come, but her limbs refused. They were more jelly than bone. Her senses were still recovering, still trying to make more out of the room aside from gravel and a dim, yellow light. 

It was like someone had placed a sepia-like lens over her eyes.

The shadow crept closer, and Hermione still tried to rear back even when it was futile. She didn't want it coming closer, didn't know if the presence creeping closer was actually Snape or some figment of her delirious imagination. 

_Merlin_.

Hermione squeezed her eyes shut, her vision beginning to splinter. She sank into the soft surface beneath her, unable to do much else.

She was going to be sick. She was going to—

“Do not _move_.”

The command had been like a _Bombarda_ being cast in a silent room. The muscles in Hermione's body that could still feel freezing at all once.

The shadow crept closer, sauntering in a smooth and elegant gate that was unmistakable. There was no question that this was Snape and not some figure donning his face to remain anonymous.

But that did nothing to abate the fear, the rush of adrenaline spiking through her brain and urging her to move. 

She was laying on a bloody bed.

How had she gotten here? Why was she even here?

Gods, why was Professor _Snape_ there with her?

“You’re ill.”

The voice was laced with arsenic, with so much frustration and disgust that it was enough to drag Hermione back from the brink of her panic attack.

She was ill? How ill could she be?

That was certainly news to her.

She didn’t remember being sick. Thinking back to all the days and weeks of pushing herself to the limit in the workplace and drafting proposals that were hardly garnering traction in the Ministry, if she was pushing herself too far, someone would have noticed. 

Wouldn't they? 

She, at the very least, would have noticed it in herself. 

“As much as it pains me to be here, I've been given as little choice as you in this matter. You were found, collapsed, in your home yesterday morning.”

_What?_

She'd collapsed? When?

She was certain that she’d remember any symptoms leading into that. Fatigue, nausea, or vertigo: she’d have noticed something amiss, but—

Her memories were a fog, a hodgepodge of bits and pieces of events that didn’t line up with Hermione lying in a bed in some unknown location with her former professor of all people. None of this made sense. 

The pounding headache was coming back.

“Do you recall what it was you were doing before you had your…rather inconvenient fainting spell?”

* * *

_Fingers wove through her hair, and carded through the wild curls framing her head. It wasn’t the first time that he’d done so, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last._

_In this state of slumber, she was finally at peace._

_For the first time, she was comfortable with her achievements, with who and what she was. Would be, given time._

_This was what he gave her, and she didn’t realise it._

_A perfect dosage of belladonna._

_A kiss, and she would come undone in a matter of moments before restful sleep found her._

_It was the same each time he visited._

_It shouldn't have been this easy to do. Hermione Granger was a hardened survivor of war, and yet, she had lowered her guard as all the rest. It didn't matter that she had taken months to do so, that he had been observing her movements for long enough to notice when she'd begun to relax, but the end result was the same._

_She had chosen to forget of the horrors of war, of the various_ _enemies she had seen imprisoned or killed. She had chosen to live her life as unguarded as her intellectually-challenged cohorts, and now—_

_He tried not to grimace at the patchwork of mild-detection spells that lined her home, disarmed._

_He supposed he shouldn’t complain, for in the end, it was her trusting nature that had made it a simple task to invade her home and tamper with her drinks. If not for this, he never would have had this opportunity._

_She released a low breath, and his attention fell to her once more._

_She was framed in white._

_Her sheets were unstained and unwrinkled. They were new. Her hair was a sharp contrast to the colour, and he followed the path each ringlet took with a finger until he was caressing her temples, her cheeks, her lips, and then, finally, her throat._

_Her unconscious swallows vibrated through his fingers, and it took everything he possessed to not squeeze that neck and jerk her awake. It was a terrible temptation, to want those eyes to gaze back at him from between dewey eyes, but the urge existed all the same._

_He’d been doing this for months, and still, that urge haunted him. It was ridiculous what lengths he had gone in order to somehow maintain relevance in Miss Granger’s life and how desperate he fought against himself to inject himself more directly even now—_

_But he recognised those urges for what they were and dismissed them._

_He was not meant to walk beneath the light. The shadows were, and would always be, his place._

_He was not a good man._

_He recognised this from the first instant he had guided Voldemort to the Potter family with the hope that Severous would have Lily Evans to himself. It didn't matter that he later left Voldemort's side. He didn't care if Voldemort took the world between his hands and crushed it. No, it was that he had_ killed _Lily_ _that had forced Severus's hand. He had promised to spare Lily's life, but instead, he only ended up dead himself at the hands of a toddler._

_Severus was a selfish man, and no matter which side he stood on, he would always be._

_What he did to Harry Potter throughout his entire schooling, what he continued to be complicit with as Harry Potter was bred for slaughter, was all that needed to be said. Severus hated the boy, and probably always would. His eyes, however, had been his only saving grace. It was for Lily that he did what was necessary to ensure the boy's survival, that he'd nearly died._

_There was nothing virtuous or noble in that._

_Just as there was nothing noble or just in drugging Hermione Granger into moments of restful sleep just so_ _he could fill the void his own mediocrity had left._

_She was so much like Lily, and yet, she was not._

_Perhaps, that was why he had the nerve to stray further down Miss Granger's throat and slide his hands beneath her nightshirt. Perhaps, it was because of that difference that he squeezed and kneaded her breasts until he became lost to sensation of bare skin against his hands. This was something he never would have dared with Lily._

_But Miss Granger was not her._

_Miss Granger was alive._

_His hands pressed against soft nipples, and he shut his eyes when they pebbled at the softest touch. The shame he felt at how hard this made him was acute, but it wasn’t enough to make him stop, wasn’t enough to stop him from trailing his fingers further still until his hand spanned over her belly._

_He was going to slide inside her, as he had for months._

_He was going to fill the void in his heart as he filled her._

_Guilt and shame plagued his every waking thought, were a permanent fixture in his mind._

_Still, they were never quite enough to_ _to make him stop._

* * *

Hermione’s breath stuttered to a halt when Professor Snape came into view, a sallow sheen to his face that Hermione didn’t recall seeing before. Admittedly, she hadn’t seen him in years since the war, since graduating from Hogwarts with top marks, and taking a rather prestigious position in the Ministry, but still—

The man himself looked more ill than she did.

There was a pause, and Hermione nearly broke out into hysterical laughter when Snape’s expression thinned into a malevolent shade of irritation. She forced herself to answer, if only to stifle the anxious energy thrumming in her gut and the pounding headache reverberating through her bloody skull.

“No—” the words were no more than a wheeze. She tried not to grimace at the sound, at the dry feeling in the back of her throat each time she swallowed. 

Snape inclined his head to the side, and it was all the confirmation she needed to know that he had understood.

How Snape had managed to discern the single utterance, she didn’t know, but she was grateful she didn't have to try again. She had a feeling whatever left her lips next would be incomprehensible at best, nonsensical at worst.

“I suspected that would be the case.”

Snape released a harsh sigh, and his fingers squeezed the bridge of it as if it would somehow release him from whatever duty he’d been tasked to do. Hermione had no way of knowing, one way or another, what that task was, but clearly, it wasn’t something he was all too keen on.

Hermione couldn’t blame him.

She wasn’t thrilled herself, all things considered.

“You were poisoned.”

Hermione didn’t move, couldn’t. The look on Snape’s face was harsh and dour, but the words he spoke rung with sincerity. It was something she’d learned to appreciate about him even as she’d hammered and railed against his cruelty when she'd been back at Hogwarts.

Snape might have been a double-agent, a skilled liar, but it was unquestionable that he was telling her the truth.

Someone had poisoned her.

It explained the lethargy, and how difficult it was to move or breathe. It rationalised the quaking in her nerves, in the jolt of nausea in her stomach that didn’t seem to abate no matter how much she tried to focus on Snape’s bottomless gaze.

Someone had _poisoned_ her.

“H-how?”

Hermione wanted to vomit, but she didn’t.She did think she had anything in her stomach to expel.

“It has been speculated that someone had tampered with your morning coffee. The detection spells found it positive for belladonna.”

_What?_

She swallowed for want of a better response, electing instead to cast Snape with the most aghast expression she could muster.

How was she still alive?

That should have killed her within the hour. There wouldn’t have been enough time to take her to St. Mungo’s from her flat. In the time it would take to find her lying on the floor and apparate her to the hospital, it would be too late.

_How am I still alive?_

“However—“ Snape’s drawl broke her from reverie, from the sheer panic beginning to climb up and up her throat until she was sure this time that she was going to vomit, “—it appears that the assassin either lacked the competency to complete the task or did not intend for you to die at all.”

Hermione locked eyes with Snape, blinking more than once for effect. Had she heard him proper? Had he, considering she had almost _died_ , sounded more insulted at the fact the killer had botched the concoction?

By the tight set to Snape's shoulders and the narrowed glower in his gaze, it was clear just where his thoughts stood on the matter. 

Hermione did laugh then, and regretted it the second after she did when a wave of vertigo overtook her. Her vision began to swim, and Snape's face twisted and undulated in a way that would have been hysterical in any other circumstance except the one they were currently in. 

Thank Merlin she hadn't had the strength to sit up on the bed in the first place. If the dizzy spell had hit her while she was sitting up, or Merlin-forbid, standing up, she could have been in a much worse predicament than she was already in.

She closed her eyes to fight off the dizziness, but the darkness in the back of her eyelids only worsened the symptoms. Her stomach heaved, and Hermione fought down the bile creeping up her throat. 

There was a long pause, and Hermione took that opportunity to focus on her own breathing and not on the wrenching in her belly. 

Hermione wasn’t sure if this silence was Snape’s own way of giving her a moment to collect herself, but she accepted it with open hands regardless. She needed to digest this, to consider how and why she had ended up in a cot in Merlin knows where.

She needed to stop herself from vomiting within the next five minutes.

_In and out._

Hermione focused on her breathing, on the chill of the room's air on the tip of her nose. She didn't know how long she did that, simply focusing on her breaths, but after some time, the nausea abated. 

_In and out._

When Hermione opened her eyes, the world she found was sharpened into focus. 

The room was still filled with more shadow than light, but she didn't expect that to change. From what little she knew of Snape, he had always preferred the shadows, the cold. It wasn't surprising to note the similarities between the room she was in and the dungeons back in Hogwarts. It only made sense that Snape would elect to recreate that ambience wherever it was that he worked, where it was that he _—_

Hermione stiffened. 

“Where are we?” Hermione asked, now needing to know more than ever where it was that she'd woken up, and Snape lips thinned further. That gesture alone told her all that she needed to know.

_Fuck._

“My home.”

Snape snarled the words out with more force than was needed, and Hermione didn’t know whether to laugh or cry that confirmation. His home? She'd been taken to his home? Why in Godric's name would he do that?

Hermione bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from letting out a nervous sound. He wouldn’t appreciate the sentiment, she knew. So instead, she settled on the safest and more neutral approach for the situation at hand.

Hermione nodded, if one could even call the subtle shift of her head that.

“Anything else, _Miss Granger_?” The question was less biting, but there was an undercurrent to it that gave her deeper pause.

She had questions, hundreds if not thousands of them buzzing in her head.They were screaming and shouting, wanting to be asked, to be voiced.

_Why his home and not St. Mungo’s? Why had no one else come to visit yet? Why had she been poisoned? Who had poisoned her? How long was she going to be there? Why was—_

It was an endless stream of question marks, of unsaid concerns and uncertainties, but they wouldn’t be well-received. Snape’s face was hard as stone, and even if it hadn’t been, Snape had never been the sort to appreciate being buried alive with questions.So as much as she wanted to mow him down with all of her inquiries, this wasn’t the time.

Asking questions at this point would only make the man dig his heels in and refuse to respond out of pure spite.For now, it was best to let him volunteer the information on his own, or, as soon as his mood was less mercurial, ask one or two safe questions that wouldn’t trigger the man’s ire.

It was the better approach, but she certainly didn’t have to like it.

“Good. You really _are_ far brighter than your colleagues.”

Hermione didn’t respond, biting her tongue in lieu of shooting Snape a barb of her own. She wanted answers. She refused to let him goad her into saying something scathing just to give him the pretext to deny answering any questions in the future.

That didn't meant he wasn't still a bastard, though. 

“Your attempted assassination aside, there are additional anomalies to your circumstances that require…a more gentle approach.”

* * *

_He was buried inside her, relishing in the warm heat between her parted thighs. With each quiver, each contraction, he fell deeper and deeper over the edge._

_His gaze was on her slumbering face, savouring the rouge on her cheeks that spread down to the column of her throat and chest. His hands spanned along the skin, and he thrust in time with each pulse of her heart._

_Thump thump._

_Push and pull._

_She was wet and tight, as she always was. It didn’t matter that she was lost in restful sleep, dreaming up a fantasy world that had no place or bearing on the reality taking place. She might remember the dream or not. She might feel strange upon wakening, more full and swollen than when she had been when she sank fast asleep in her living room settee or bed._

_It was the same in the end._

_He would bury himself inside her after worshipping her breasts, her stomach, her hips, her thighs, and the slit between her legs. He’d be careful with her, gentle. Her body was no different than a potion, no less volatile._

_He’d learned her after weeks of careful study, and now—_

_He bewitched her._

_He took her to the precipice in slumber, forced her through throes of pleasure that her sleep addled mind could not comprehend and never would. Her twitching eyelids would not waken, his dose was nothing short of perfect._

_He didn’t stop even when he came._

_He forced his fingers insider her, curling the and twisting until she splattered all over her bed._

_He tasted her, himself, on her lips when he kneeled between her splayed thighs._

_It was wrong._

_And yet, he still washed her with the reverence of a worshipper caring for a goddess. He cleansed her with a rag rather than a wand, never a wand. He healed each bruise that he squeezed into her arms, her thighs, and her hips with his grip. He was nothing short of kind, and yet—_

_It was still a violation._

_He still needed to eliminate all evidence of his presence from her body, from her bed, and from her home._

_What he did was reprehensible, loathsome and disgraceful. There was not a single moment that he did not regret his continued visits._

_He’d considered stopping, of leaving things be and moving out of Britain if only to silence that guilt eating him alive._

_But it never worked, of course. He couldn't stop._

_He always returned._

_He was an addict, and he has taken it upon himself to mold her into one as well._

_The potions were nothing short of disastrous when overused, and he had stepped past the point of overuse._

_Her body needed the substances he fed her as much as he himself needed to fill that empty hole in his chest. That hole hadn't cared that Hermione Granger would suffer with a lifelong addiction to opium, hadn't cared that continued use of the opioids would result in her inevitable collapse, and—_

_He hadn't cared then, and even now, drowning in his own guilt, he still didn't._

_She was dying in slow motion, and it was his burden to bear._

_He supposed it was better to be dead than live with what would come after,_ _than to know the truth of what he was doing to her as she slept._

_It was a kindness in its own way._

_At least, that was what he told himself._

* * *

Snape’s face fell into something akin to disappointment, to _pity_ , and Hermione’s heart stuttered in her chest to make sense of that strange look on the sour man’s face.

He didn’t do _pity._

Even if it was a glacial, distant sort of pity, Snape didn’t bother with such sentiments.

He was above them. He was a cruel, jaded man that lacked proper empathy to deal with most of humanity, and—

“If it were simply the nightshade, you’d have woken in a hospital bed in St. Mungo’s. It’s hardly anything to be concerned over, given that most can survive if treated in time.”

Hermione didn’t want to look at that expression any longer, but she couldn’t look away. She had to know as much as she didn’t. She could hardly breathe through the anxious thrum in her veins, through the tightening in her chest.

She was on the brink of panic. Her breaths were coming in shallow, hollow.

“But you—“

Snape stepped close enough that his legs were pressing against the bed. The pity was still there, but there was a glimmer of something else now, something she didn’t recognise in those dead black eyes.

It looked like guilt, like remorse.

_No._

“You’re in a perpetual state of cellular death.”

Hermione blinked, uncomprehending. 

_Cellular death._

“Your organs are severely damaged. It appears that you have been subjected to an extensive array of poisoning over the course of year.”

Hermione opened her mouth, but the words refused to come. She didn’t understand.

It didn’t make sense. None of it.

A year.

She was being poisoned for at least a bloody _year_.

She was—

“You don’t have much time left to live.”

Hermione stopped breathing. 

No, that wasn't right. It couldn't be. 

That was impossible. 

She couldn't be dying, not now. Not _—_

Snape didn’t stay long after that. He left her alone in the dim room, and Hermione cried so hard she vomited off to the side of the bed. Her nose was clogged, stuffed with snot. Her tears had long since dried, but her chest still ached. She was lucky she hadn't choked on her vomit, but what difference did that make? What did that matter?

She couldn’t breathe.

She couldn’t—

She was _dying_.

* * *

_It wasn’t difficult to lie._

_It wasn’t difficult to increase the dosage and push Hermione Granger quietly over the edge._

_What he hadn’t counted on was the visceral pain that overtook him at the sight of her limp body, at the way her cheeks began to drain with blood as the nightshade devoured what life she had left._

_He had intended for her to die._

_He couldn’t keep this up, not anymore. He was going to make a mistake and be discovered. Her friends were brainless, but her colleagues in the Ministry had begun to notice something strange. She might not have been able to distinguish her symptomology with that of overexertion, but it was only a matter of time._

_They would uncover the truth, and then—_

_He was supposed to let her die._

_He was supposed to let them find her, poisoned, in her home._

_But he couldn’t do it, couldn’t let her fade._

_Even if it might come at the price of his freedom, even if it meant that she might learn the truth of what he had done and would continue to do, he could not._

_What a fool he was._


End file.
